Jean-François Noubel argues that balancing masculine and feminine energies makes you more creative and authentic, and that this balance naturally inspires others without needing to convince them. He designs invisible architectures—circular seating, alternative currencies, new languages—that create conditions for emergence rather than forcing change. He also connects veganism to rejecting domination and rebalancing those energies.
Chapters
What do you think, Jean-François, how, what needs to be done to help people understand that they have to rebalance those two, to be more creative and just be who they truly are? Well, I don't know if I have an ultimate recipe for that. I can only talk about my own belief and what I have chosen to do. First, to become that. To allow myself to evolve as much and as far as I can. And with gentleness and kindness, because I could also put myself a kind of masculine pressure to become this or that, and to put kind of super masculine evolutionary way and fall back into the usual trap of running after someone you haven't embodied yet. So it has to go both in the masculine of kind of conquering new spaces, you know, shedding light inside and understanding new things and welcoming my emotions. It has some kind of masculinity in this, or masculine dynamics in this. And then at the same time, just, you know, taking good care of myself and giving myself time to nurture, to rebuild, to give kindness, gentleness, and all those things. And if I do that to myself, I'll do it to others, no doubt about it. The other thing that I noticed, you know, when you become someone— when that makes you a happier person, someone more creative, someone with a better socially consistent and all those things, Well, it seems that it inspires other people. I don't have to tell people what they should do or to give advice and all those things unless people ask me. But just, you know, people ask me just like today, why don't— why, Jeff, why don't you share your experience? And I've seen that it happens a lot. I speak a lot publicly online or in the media here in France. The other thing about evolution goes into creativity. And that connects to my work as a researcher. It goes into this question: what conditions for emergence can I create? I can't force people, but I can create conditions for emergence. And that goes into this very deep field that we call invisible architectures. To understand that, you can understand that through visible architecture. Like, if you wanted to create a space where people will go into empathy and mutual care and all those things, You don't go to McDonald's or a corporate environment, you will go into a specific architecture where people can sit in circle and when they have, you know, very nice place, inviting place, that will facilitate this process. It doesn't mean everyone will go there, it will create the conditions for emergence for that. Architecture does that. Well, why can't we do it also with designing new currency systems? Why don't we do it with designing new forms of language and new ontological structures? Why don't we do it with the way we relate with other beings? For instance, I've seen that deactivating the pattern, you know, that Mark described so well of masculinity, you know, the one imposed by society, evolved greatly when I left the speciesism, you know, the thinking that our species has every possible right to dominate all the other species on Earth. And so I became a vegan person. And that, you know, people usually confuse veganism with food. No, veganism means that you've also stepped out of speciesism. That means to consider you as the master of the world that has every possible right to dominate, just like we did with other categories of human beings, you know, whether because of their skin color, because of their gender, because whatever reason. Cultural reason we may find to justify that. Speciesism works the same way. And so stepping out of this ideology as well really helped me a lot. And I see more and more people also making this amazing step. And, you know, jumping into veganism, that means stepping out of speciesism, stepping out of the— how we say— the word will come back to me. Anyway, So we have many ways to create conditions for emergence, and you don't force people in doing that, you create possibilities for emergence. And I find it very, very, very powerful, and I can share more, of course, anytime if you are interested in that. Beautiful. It is.
